When the American journalist Suzy Hansen first arrived in Istanbul in 2007 on a research trip for an NGO, the promise of a rapidly liberalising Turkey engulfed her. The country’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was pledging to make his Muslim-majority nation a member of the European Union. In its ‘sunny, youthful, rising days’, Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey’ seemed to offer a stable model for the Middle East. The economy appeared to flourish. Taboo subjects, in a place that has often denied its genocidal histories, were given oxygen. The once agonisingly poor country, at least in Istanbul’s bohemian enclave Cihangir, where Hansen settled, looked ‘shinier’.

Hansen was not alone in her admiration of Turkey. Opinion leaders of the West, in outlets like the New York Times and The Economist, backed Erdoğan, a self-styled ‘conservative democrat’ (in the late 1990s) who became prime minister in 2003. It was the economic vision of Erdoğan’s AK Party, ‘capitalism plus faith’, that allayed concerns about his background as an anti-Western Islamist student leader. Hansen, who spent her twenties as a reporter for the New York Observer in the Islamophobic, warmongering atmosphere of New York City at the start of the new millennium, viewed this man – ‘American-ish, speaking of human rights and compromise’ – as a possible intermediary in the ‘clash of civilisations’ that followed 9/11. 

Hansen’s first book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World (2017), reckoned with her homeland’s violent role in the world, and described how, after the Second World War, the United States shaped the thinking of Turkey’s leaders, turning the former seat of the Islamic caliphate